5/06/2010 @ 4:28PM

Immigration, Terror And Assimilation

Strange, isn’t it, that the terror attempt on Times Square hasn’t so far made its way into the broader debate on immigration. The accused wannabe car bomber, Faisal Shahzad, is a naturalized U.S. citizen, a Pakistani immigrant of Pashtun extraction with roots in the frontier city of Peshawar. Peshawar is a crumbling, ornate warren of Pakistani Taliban activity teeming with violent tribesmen, opium smugglers and radical mosques. Pakistan proper ends at the city’s outskirts, and the Tribal Territories stretch out towards the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan in one direction and al-Qaida-dominated Waziristan in another.

At first glance one can see why U.S. immigration officials allowed Feisal Shahzad to come to America and settle. Consider his attributes: educated, hardworking, well-off–what’s to dislike?–plus his father was a top officer in the elite Pakistan Air Force dating from a time of close anti-Soviet alliance with the West. But a lot has changed in the region since then–by the late 1990s Peshawar’s air-force base was being used to provide air support for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance resistance inside Afghanistan. And now the wheel has turned yet again: The Taliban and Pakistani military are mostly at daggers drawn. How can we expect U.S. security personnel to keep abreast of such nuanced trouble zones and the changeable individuals they produce–and from just one geographical sliver of the Muslim world–when there’s so much else to monitor worldwide?

This is where Shahzad’s case enters the broader immigration debate, for with the mounting numbers of legal and illegal aliens to America, and the complexity of regional enmities that we import, we face a host of ugly triage decisions. We’re not facing them with any grit or honesty. Even if we could monitor all the immigrant communities closely, think of the monetary costs involved and the costs to our rights and liberties. Times Square will now likely become a kind of 24/7 Big Brother reality show bristling with security cameras. How long before much of the country follows suit? Even in New York, a city where law enforcement couldn’t be more attuned to terror patterns, Police Commissioner Kelly made no apologies for Shahzad being caught only after boarding a flight to the Gulf. That’s as good as it gets. I believe it.

In the immigration debate we have drifted into side issues (however important), such as legal vs. illegal immigration, the tribulations of warrantless searches, identification Cards, profiling and the like. With the recent “immigration marches” on Washington, the nation gave birth to an entirely new interest group with aggrieved identity issues–call it the “Big Immigrant” lobby, as in Big Tobacco and Big Oil. No matter that most of the disparate subgroups would never exchange a civic word with the others in normal circumstances–Mexicans and Somalis? Guineans and Salvadorans? Taiwanese and, well, you fill in the dots. But they are all, it seems, united in opening the doors wider and keeping them open. None of them seem concerned with the ultimate outcome. When do we reach a limit? How do we know when we get there? When it’s too late? And what will that look like, I wonder.

In the meantime, already, the immigrant rights movement brings with it a whole new set of politically correct impositions on free speech. You can criticize the habits and flaws of a country, of say Mexicans in Mexico, but try criticizing its citizens once they’re here and not there. Try depicting one negatively in a newspaper cartoon for, say, gunning down a sheriff in Arizona–how would you go about it without visual stereotyping? Did I say satirical cartoons? Perish the thought. As for law enforcement, try focusing on a particular ethnic or religious group over another for specific criminal activities even though all the statistics say you should.

I’m an immigrant. I’m not a proud immigrant, by which I mean I’m not proud just for being an immigrant. If I have any cause to feel pride (when did it stop being a sin?) I would feel some in direct proportion to the degree that I have become more American. Fellow immigrant pals upbraid me for thinking this way but here’s how I feel: I was invited to live in someone else’s house, ultimately to share it, a vast house with generous occupants, Americans who were already here for generations. They were kind enough to let me come and stay and prosper, and integrate, but they didn’t have to do so. It wasn’t my right. I became a naturalized citizen, but I still feel that I owe them for their kindness. And what I owe them is not to hijack their house, take whatever rooms I can and turn it into the old country, sneak others in until inch by inch the inhabitants are estranged in their own house. My family brought us to America because they liked America as it was, with all its flaws, not because we wanted to turn America into elsewhere so as to feel at home.

The task of monitoring immigrants in order to obstruct terrorist plots or impede cross-border drug smuggling will quickly grow to impossible proportions. As the numbers mount, it cannot be managed with foolproof success. There is another way, if we have the will, which is to hold the line for a while and work on integration. That is, on Americanizing those that are already here. What does that mean? At the very least it means they should complete the journey from being proud immigrants to becoming proud Americans. Ultimately, they should transplant their dangling nerve ends of grievance from their old culture, all healed and realigned, to their new culture. For there’s no telling, amid the current chaos, how the son of a peaceful Yemeni or Somali immigrant will feel tomorrow as U.S. policies change towards their countries. They may, like Shahzad, stay mum about their growing disaffection before they suddenly commit some enormity.

If we take one overriding lesson from the Shahzad affair, it’s should be this: Incomplete assimilation can be a ticking bomb. The formula–if they work hard, eat Big Macs, watch TV and spend money, the system is working, and we leave the rest to their own culture–won’t suffice anymore. This country must offer, and demand, a deeper level of integration and belonging. We must erode away the hyphenation of our identities. America is a kind of lifeboat wherein we can save some but not all. Triage decisions become imperative. Lifeboats survive on unity and precise numbers. Otherwise, everyone loses.